[tahoe-dev] Windows 7 install Error on 1.8

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Hello Paul Grunwald:

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Paul Grunwald <pgrunwald at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hi All,  I wanted to play with this before tying to port to the DLink
> DNS-321.

Cool! Searching for that name led me to http://wiki.dns323.info which
says that it has 64 MiB RAM. Last time I checked the memory usage of a
Tahoe-LAFS storage server it was about 56 MiB. That was on an x86 CPU
using Python 2.5 or Python 2.4.

> distutils.errors.DistutilsError: Setup script exited with error: Unable to
> find
>
> vcvarsall.bat

Sigh. The meaning of this is that it is trying to install some
required library, such as pycryptopp, zfec, pyOpenSSL, PyCrypto, or
Twisted, and it first looked here for a binary package that fits your
operating system and version of Python:
http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/?C=M;O=D
, and not finding such a binary package there it then attempted to
compile it from source, and failed because you don't have a compiler
installed or else the Python "distutils" tool couldn't find your
compiler.

By the way, I think this is a very common problem for people trying to
use Tahoe-LAFS and I appreciate you reporting it.

I think the next step may be to add code to catch that exception and
report a meaningful error message to the user saying *which* package
it failed to compile and explaining that the only reason it was even
attempting to compile it in the first place is that it didn't find a
binary.

Also, to actually get it working for you we need to figure out what
package is missing for your operating system and version of Python and
get someone to build such a package and upload it to that directory.
It is trivial to build a package once you have the compiler and all
that working -- you just run "python setup.py bdist_egg". So if we can
figure out which package is missing we can ask one of our
Windows-using volunteers to build that one.

Regards,

Zooko